Viktor Orban And The Future Of The WestBy Rod Dreher
February 16, 2022
Yesterday I was invited to go with a group of American and western European visiting intellectuals and journalists to the office of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to meet the leader and spend about an hour talking with him. This happened to me once before, three or four years ago, when I was here in Budapest speaking at a religious liberty conference. I had anticipated that this would be a short meet-and-greet, but it turned into a 90-minute session in which Orban fielded questions from visitors, and discoursed with sophistication and confidence about politics at a level that you just never see from US presidents. I found it stunning, frankly, that this man I had been informed by the US media was nothing but an authoritarian thug was, in fact, very far from the liberal caricature.
It happened again yesterday, with the other visitors. After we finished our session, I heard lots of chatter, with people saying they were quite taken aback by how sharp, smart, and quick on his feet Orban was (and not only Orban, but Katalin Novak, the longtime Family Minister in the Orban government, who is now about to be elected state President by Parliament). One American and I ended up talking about how much the image of Hungary in America has changed, at least among conservatives, because of Orban’s sitting down with Tucker Carlson for an interview last year, and how much it could yet change the more Orban would be able to get in front of the American people to make his case.
At one point, Orban, a Calvinist, was asked about his government’s support for persecuted Christians abroad. As I wrote here last year, he established a ministry out of his office to assist and defended persecuted Christian communities. He told the visitors yesterday that to defend and help these Christians is, for him, his Christian duty. He added that as he sees it, defending Christianity is intimately tied to defending the Hungarian nation, as so many times in this nation’s history — such as with the Ottoman Turks and the Soviets (but nobody mention the Habsburgs!) — the attack on Hungarian sovereignty was led by an outside force that despised Christianity.
Later, when Novak arrived, the two were asked about Hungary’s family policy, and its policy towards LGBT people, which has caused such a furor abroad. Orban said the way to think about Hungary’s approach is not to think about LGBT people per se, but about how they fit into a society that prioritizes the natural family, and traditional marriage.
“We are freedom fighters,” he said. “That means the freedom of homosexuals as well.”
He pointed out that in Hungary, gays and lesbians are guaranteed civil partnerships in law, but they cannot have formal marriage. That is reserved for one man and one woman, because that is what marriage and family is.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-future-of-the-west/
